Growth: Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BCE–1350 CE, by Ian Morris
Up-to-date empirical/conceptual Gellnerian/Spencerian panoramic view of ancient world’s organisational evolution
Ian Morris wrote:
Growth Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BCE–1350 CE
The story
Humans, like all animals, need to cooperate to get things done, and this chapter tells the story of how people organized cooperation between 1000 BCE and 1350 CE.
Through most of history, kinship had been the main basis for cooperation, and families, clans, and tribes remained important institutions throughout the period discussed in this chapter. However, kin-based organizations have their limitations (try building a Roman road if only your brothers and cousins show up), and people began forming non-kin groups well before 1000 BCE. Many social scientists would say that the state, an organization claiming to monopolize the right to use or authorize violence is the most important of these, and the first states had been created around 3500 BCE in the Middle East. In this chapter, ‘social and political organizations’ mean primarily families, clans, tribes, cities, states and empires, although I touch on other kinds of organizations as well, particularly churches and businesses, because it is hard to separate social and political organizations from religious and economic ones.
Humans learned to cooperate on larger and larger scales, as small organizations were swallowed up by larger ones, and large organizations became larger still. …
Bigger, wider, stronger, deeper
At its most basic level, growth was human. In 1000 BCE, there were about 120 million people in the world. By the midpoint of our story, in 175 CE, the population had roughly doubled to 250 million. It kept growing until the early fourteenth century, but only by another 50 per cent, to close to 400 million, before falling back—for reasons we will return to—to about 350 million in 1350.
The social and political organizations that these more numerous people created grew even faster. In 1000 BCE, the world’s largest cities—probably Qi in China and Susa in Iran—had around 30,000 residents, but by 175 CE, Rome was over thirty times bigger, at about a million people. Seventh-Century Chang’an and eleventh-century Kaifeng (both in China) probably matched this, but the biggest city in 1350, Hangzhou (again in China), had about 750,000 souls.
The size of states followed a similar pattern. Space and demography are the two obvious ways to measure this. …
… The most populous state in 1000 BCE was Egypt, with around 2.5 million subjects. In 175 CE, both Rome and Han China were twenty times as big, with roughly 50 million members. Growth then continued, but more slowly, with China reaching the 75 million to 100 million range in 1350. …
… Measuring states’ capacities to get things done is trickier, and sociologists have been designing metrics for a century. I have previously suggested yet another method, which is a numerical index of social development that measures societies’ abilities to organize and get things done, on a scale running from 1 to 1,000 points. Criteria used in this index includes use of urban engineering, examples of infrastructure in place, economic standards relating to commerce and tax collection, highly organized public arts and education facilities, etc. In 1000 BCE, the highest-scoring region by this method was Egypt, with a little over 22 points; in 175 CE, it was the Roman Empire, at just over 43 points; in 1350 it was China, with a little over 40 points.
The histories of families and states can be difficult to separate from those of firms or churches, partly because one of the major ways they overlap is that bigger states provided bigger stages for economic and religious cooperation to play out. Trade networks, for instance, regularly extend beyond political frontiers, but when political frontiers are enlarged, supply chains often grow with them. …
… [On] the whole, inequality grew alongside income. Economists typically measure inequality with the Gini coefficient … Gini scores for income inequality in preindustrial peasant societies mostly range between about 0.30 and 0.60, with a mean around 0.48. We have no good figures for Egypt in 1000 BCE, but the archaeological evidence implies that scores were in the lower half of this range. For Rome, the data are better, and its Gini score in 175 CE was around 0.44. For China in 1350, trustworthy data are lacking, but a score even higher than Rome’s seems likely. Across 2,350 years, the poor became slightly less poor, while the rich became a lot richer.
Religious organizations also grew in numbers and in influence. Polytheistic communities usually have blurry boundaries … On the whole, though, in the first half of our period, the main mechanism of religious expansion was for conquering empires to spread their gods, or something like them, as they went. … By 1350 more than half the world’s population followed Jesus, Muhammad, or the Buddha (about 75 million, 60 million, and 50 million people, respectively). …
To get a sense of how the planet’s parts fit together and to see how the story of the biggest social and political organizations compares to that of smaller units, we … [can] show the distribution of forms of social and political organization around the world in 1000 BCE, 175 CE, and 1350 respectively, divided into six crude categories: foraging families, pastoral tribes, pastoral empires, agricultural villages, ‘low-end’ agricultural states, and ‘high-end’ agricultural states. …
[various graphs and maps omitted here]
… Basically, the area occupied by foraging families shrank steadily between 1000 BCE and 1350 CE, as farmers expelled foragers from their homelands, pushing them back into ecological niches that the farmers did not want (such as Siberia) or had not yet reached (such as coastal Australia). The area occupied by pastoral tribes also shrank as huge areas of the steppes came under the control of pastoral empires. The area occupied by agricultural villages increased at the expense of foraging families between 1000 BCE and 175 CE (especially in Africa), but then shrank as villages were brought under the control of states faster than farmers dispossessed foragers. The area occupied by agricultural states grew massively across the whole period, mostly at the expense of farming villages, but the balance between low-end and high-end states varied significantly.
In 1000 BCE, there were no high-end states, but between then and 175 CE, two separate patterns unfolded. In the Americas and Africa, low-end states grew at the expense of agricultural villages, but in Eurasia low-end states were largely wiped out by high-end states. After 175 CE, this was partly reversed, as low-end states replaced high-end ones in western Eurasia. In South and East Asia, high-end states took over some of the area where there had once been low-end states, while in Southeast and Northeast Asia and the Americas, low-end states expanded dramatically. …
[All the evidence presented] raises five interesting questions.
First, why did social and political organizations grow in scale, wealth, hierarchy, complexity, and effectiveness between 1000 BCE and 1350 CE? Second, why did growth differ so much before and after 175 CE? Third, why did growth so often turn into collapse? Fourth, why did the forms of organizations vary so much from one place to another at any given point in time? And fifth, why did Eastern Eurasia displace Western as the heartland of the world’s biggest, most powerful states after 175 CE?
I suggest that the answers to these questions point us towards a big conclusion: that between 1000 BCE and 1350 CE social and political organizations reached the limits of what was possible under purely agrarian conditions. The Roman Empire was the first to reach this ceiling, two thousand years ago, and Song dynasty China repeated the feat a millennium later.”
In each case, however, growth then turned into stagnation and collapse. Not until the eighteenth century did a society—Britain—shatter the old order by unlocking the energy trapped in fossil fuels.
Homo superans
To some extent, the answer to all these questions is simply that what happened between 1000 BCE and 1350 CE was pretty much continuous from the end of the main phase of the Ice Age around 12,700 BCE. These 2,350 years are simply one chapter in a much longer story of growth.
To explain, let us make a quick jump back into prehistory. There were approximately 4 million people on earth in 12,700 BCE, none of them living in communities of more than a few score members, whereas today there are 7 billion, of whom one in twenty lives in ‘mega-cities’ of ten million-plus residents. The average nation has 34 million citizens, and China and India each have well over a billion. In 12,700 BCE, by Maddison’s estimates, the average standard of living was equivalent to something like USD1.10 per day; now it is USD25 per day. Fifteen thousand years ago, the typical hunter-gatherer band had a Gini score for income inequality around 0.25; now most nations score higher, around 0.30–0.35 (although this is a substantial decline from typical scores of 0.40–0.50 in 1350; what economists call the ‘great compression’ in incomes between 1920 and 1970 was a remarkable break with long-term trends, which seem now to have resumed). And the power of states has surged; on my index measuring capacity to get things done (discussed earlier), scores leap from under 5 points in 12,700 BCE to 906 points in 2000 CE. Organizational growth has exploded since 1800 CE, but it has been a big part of life for fifteen millennia.
And yet, growing social and political organizations were not always a big part of life. Two conditions were required for growth: first, the exceptionally productive brains that Homo sapiens evolved roughly 100,000 years ago, and second, the warm and wet climate—what the archaeologist Brian Fagan calls ‘the long summer’—that has prevailed since the end of the Ice Age. There were several long summers before 100,000 BCE, but no Homo sapiens to respond to them by creating bigger organizations; and between 100,000 and 15,000 BCE there was Homo sapiens, but no long summers. Only in the last 15,000 years have both conditions been present, and these turned Homo sapiens, ‘Knowing man’, into Homo superans, ‘Growing man’.
In the warm, wet, post-glacial world, plants converted a bonanza of solar energy into more of themselves, and animals ate the abundant plants (and each other) and multiplied, too. Every species, including Homo sapiens, reproduced until it outran the resources available, whereupon its population crashed. Homo sapiens, however, had brains so fast and flexible that we could potentially react to shortage (and, for that matter, to abundance) by innovating, and changing how we gathered plants and hunted animals. No one knew what the results would be, but by applying new selective pressures to food sources, humans created the world’s first genetically modified organisms. Some plants and animals evolved into new, domesticated forms, which provided far more food for humans than their wild precursors.
Domestication brought both costs and benefits. There was more food, which gave more people a better chance to live, but also more work; and people had to reorganize their societies to manage increasing scale. Reorganization typically meant more permanent villages, stronger property rights, and greater political, economic, and gender inequality, but it also brought increasing knowledge, labour specialization, and sophistication. People had free will, and could (and did) choose to resist some or all of these trends, but across thousands of years, groups that moved towards ‘growth-friendly’ institutions and values—including patriarchy, hierarchy, and slavery, as well as literacy and high culture—replaced those that did not.
Village life appeared in the Middle East by 12,500 BCE, domestication by 9500 BCE, and full-blown agriculture over the following two millennia, but none was a one-off event. Farmers kept learning—to rotate cereals and pulses so as not to exhaust the soil; to terrace hillsides; to harness animals to ploughs and carts and to use their manure to increase yields; to redirect rivers to irrigate crops; to desalinate the ground as irrigation deposited salt in it; to use metal tools to dig their fields—and so on. Innovations raised output, supporting more people and requiring bigger social and political organizations; but to support these innovations and hold together these groups, people had to keep revolutionizing their institutions and worldviews. Each solution created new problems, but over the very long run, one of most consistently adopted strategies has been to increase the scale of social and political organizations.
A single formula explains many of the statistics at the beginning of this chapter: Homo superans + long summer = growth. However, it clearly does not explain everything … Some homines were more superantes than others, and we need to know why.
The power of place
[The] … world’s biggest social and political organizations normally clustered in what I call the ‘lucky latitudes’, where environment and history combined to enrich economies, stimulate innovation, and accelerate change: a band stretching from China to the Mediterranean in the Old World, and from Peru to Mexico in the New World. The evolutionist and geographer Jared Diamond explained why in his classic book Guns, Germs, and Steel, but historians have not always appreciated the implications of his arguments for the period from 1000 BCE to 1350 CE. We cannot make sense of these centuries without knowing a few facts about prehistoric geography.
The hard truth, Diamond points out, is that potentially domesticable plants and animals were very unevenly distributed at the end of the Ice Age. The vast majority had evolved in the lucky latitudes; which, given that human beings are much the same everywhere, meant that it was overwhelmingly likely that people there would domesticate plants and animals earlier than people in other places. The job was simply easier in the lucky latitudes.
Further, Diamond observes, even within the lucky latitudes, resources were distributed unevenly. The most richly endowed part of Eurasia was what we now call the Middle East, followed by East and South Asia, and then Mexico and Peru. Consequently, signs of domestication come first in the Middle East (around 9500 BCE), followed by Pakistan and China (about 7500 BCE), and then Mexico and Peru (about 6250 BCE). Outside the lucky latitudes, where resources were scarcer, moves towards domestication began in eastern North America by around 4500 BCE, in the Sahel and southern Africa before around 3000 BCE, and—in a fascinating outlier, to which I will return—in New Guinea at least as early as 6000 BCE.
On the whole, each part of the world followed a roughly similar timetable once it started down the path of growth. It normally took two to four millennia to go from the first intervention in other species’ genomes to permanent farming villages with hundreds of residents. It then took another two to four millennia for agricultural villages to grow into what I call ‘low-end’ states with monarchs, priests, aristocrats, and (usually) writing, and a further 1,500–2,500 years for these to turn into ‘high-end’ empires with tens of millions of subjects and extremely sophisticated elite cultures.
The details of the timing depended on local resources, the peculiarities of each culture, and the specific decisions its members made. In the New World, perhaps because there were so few domesticable large mammals, people generally took twice as long (four rather than two millennia) to get from simple to advanced farming as those in the Eurasian lucky latitudes; while New Guineans, despite having enough domesticable plants to be able to begin farming almost as early as people in Mexico and Peru, lacked the resources to generate the kind of surplus that fed the first states within the lucky latitudes. The unsuitability of the main local crops—taro and bananas—to long-term storage (compared, say, to rice, wheat and barley, all of which store well) was probably also important.
Each region was unique, yet it is broadly true that the earlier an area started down the path of sociopolitical growth, the bigger its organizations were in 1000 BCE. Thus, the largest, richest, most unequal, and most complex social and political organizations clustered toward the western end of Eurasia (particularly in a triangle with points in what are now Egypt, Turkey, and western Iran), followed by northern China and India, and then Mexico and Peru.
Some parts of the world, such as Australia and Siberia, were so short of domesticable plants and animals that they had barely started down this path by 1350 CE, while others found different paths of growth. On the steppes, the arid grasslands running across the Old World from Manchuria to Hungary, almost nothing grows that humans can eat; but cattle, sheep, and horses thrive on its grass, and humans eat animals. By about 5000 BCE, farmers had migrated into the western steppes from the Balkans and turned into herders, and before 4000 BCE herders in what is now Kazakhstan had domesticated wild horses. Between 1000 BCE and 1350 CE, steppe horsemen created distinct kinds of pastoral states and empires that fought and even overthrew the agrarian societies of the lucky latitudes.
Much of this chapter’s story, then, was simply the playing out of trends that had been at work since about 13,000 BCE. Humans kept finding that bigger social and political organizations were good solutions to their problems, and so these organizations grew almost everywhere; and organizations inside the lucky latitudes, which had been the world’s biggest since the end of the Ice Age, remained bigger, richer, and more sophisticated than those outside them.
However [the evidence shows] that this is not the whole story. Although in 175 CE the world’s biggest organizations were in western Eurasia, and had been for more than ten thousand years, by 1350 East Asia had taken the lead and the Mediterranean and Middle East had seen their biggest states shrink (but neither their biggest religious organizations, and in certain senses, nor their biggest economic organizations). This was one of the biggest shifts in wealth and power in history, but to date there is little agreement on its causes.
Biology and geography, we should conclude, do much to answer the five questions posed earlier in this chapter, but they do not answer everything. It is time to look at other causes by taking three snapshots of the world at the beginning, middle, and end of our period.
The world in 1000 BCE
By 1000 BCE, farmers had already spread over much of the world’s arable land, and by 1350 CE almost all of it was under hoe or plough. Archaeologists still dispute the details, but a great Bantu migration, which carried farming, herding, and ironworking from west and central Africa to the continent’s eastern and southern regions, probably began soon after 1000 BCE. Metal-using rice farmers were colonizing Sri Lanka from India by 600 BCE and southern Japan from Korea by 500 BCE, and by then other East Asian farmers had taken to their canoes to settle the westernmost islands of Oceania. These islands were normally uninhabited until the farmers arrived, but in most places the advance of agriculture meant the retreat of hunting and gathering.
Probably less than one per cent of world’s population still lived in egalitarian foraging bands in 1000 BCE. Most of these groups were highly mobile and family-based, often of fewer than a dozen people. Their hierarchy was normally very limited and based mainly on age and sex. Multiple bands would periodically gather at festivals for activities which required larger groups and—equally important—to provide a viable gene pool for exchanging marriage partners, and temporary chiefs might take charge of these meetings.
That said, foraging societies were highly varied, and where resources were very abundant or it was possible to store gathered foods, larger, more permanent and hierarchical groups grew up. The most famous of these ‘affluent foragers’ lived in the Pacific Northwest, where the invention of plank canoes around 800 CE allowed foragers to catch huge hauls of wild salmon.
Another small percentage of the world’s population in 1000 BCE lived as herders, mostly on the steppe and desert fringes of the Eurasian lucky latitudes or the African savannahs (the Americas and Australia had few large mammals to herd). They typically lived in kin-based groups a few dozen or hundred strong. Within these groups (‘clans’ and ‘tribes’ are common labels) some families might be much richer than others, although because wealth was embodied largely in livestock, a family’s fortunes could fluctuate wildly.
These pastoral groups became much more mobile after 1000 BCE, thanks to the domestication of the Arabian camel and the breeding on the steppes of horses big and strong enough to be ridden for long distances. Mobility massively multiplied nomads’ military power, which created incentives for chiefs to form larger alliances that could field thousands of riders to plunder the borderlands of agrarian states or to extort protection money from agrarian rulers. Assyrian letters say that Cimmerian horsemen defeated the king of Urartu as early as 707 BCE. Assyria fought back, hiring steppe cavalry as mercenaries, and in 677 BCE defeated the Cimmerians and slew their king; but in 652 BCE the nomads returned, sacking Sardis and killing Lydia’s King Gyges. In 612 BCE, the nomad Scythians played a large part in destroying the Assyrian Empire itself.
More than 95 per cent of humanity, however, were farmers, the great majority of them in relatively simple groups lacking centralized governments that monopolized legitimate use of violence. As with foragers, organizations varied widely. At one extreme were small-scale, quite egalitarian villages such as those of the Early Woodland cultures of the American Midwest (c. 1000–300 BCE), which rarely had more than about fifty residents, combined simple agriculture with foraging, and practised communal rituals. At the other were places like the Olmec town of La Venta, which, by 750 BCE, had several thousand residents busily erecting massive earth platforms, a hundred-foot-tall pyramid, and monumental basalt heads. Olmec leaders clearly mobilized labour on a large scale, perhaps through feasting and mutual obligations between kin groups; most archaeologists doubt that Olmec leaders commanded permanent, coercion-wielding state institutions.
Almost without exception, these non-state farming societies were illiterate because they lacked organizations large enough to make writing a requirement. The main exceptions were in the East Mediterranean, where a band of states with literate bureaucracies had stretched from Elam to Egypt and Greece before the great collapse around 1200 BCE. In places where some state institutions survived, such as Egypt, so did writing, but in those where the state vanished altogether, such as Greece, writing vanished, too. However, Greeks remained in contact with the still-literate societies and around 800 BCE adapted the Phoenician alphabet for their own purposes. As a result, in Greece and also in Israel, early-first-millennium BCE literature gives vivid glimpses into the internal workings of stateless farming societies, graphically describing unstable political organizations going though painful and often violent processes of state formation.
Just 10 million to 20 million of the world’s 120 million people lived in states in 1000 BCE, all them in the Eurasian lucky latitudes. Government had survived the 1200 BCE collapse in a scatter of places between Egypt and Elam, but in South Asia, a millennium would pass between the Indus Valley collapse around 1900 BCE and the formation of new city-states in the Ganges Valley after 900 BCE. In East Asia, the first states only formed around 1900 BCE, but by 1000 BCE their descendants ruled much of northern China. In the New World, however, the Olmecs mentioned previously and the Chavín civilization in Peru were, at best, borderline examples of states. …
… Only a few societies looked much like [Ernest Gellner’s] Agraria [links to previous SSF exhibits here and here to explain ‘Agraria’] in 1000 BCE, and by the standards of what would come later, even they were decidedly ramshackle; I therefore call them ‘low-end’ states. Egypt was probably the biggest and strongest, but had lost its Levantine and Nubian empire by 1100 BCE. By the 1060s BCE, the Nile Valley had fragmented, too. One dynasty ruled from Tanis in the delta, while the high priests of the god Amun acted as kings in their own right at Thebes. By the 940s BCE, a Libyan dynasty of ‘Great Chiefs of Ma’ was also ruling from Bubastis, and in the ninth century BCE, things fell apart even more. These mini-states coexisted reasonably peacefully (‘As for pharaoh,’ asks a letter dated to 1072 BCE, ‘whose superior is he anyway?’), if only because none seems to have been capable of doing very much. Their administrations produced few texts, raised few taxes, and launched few expeditions, and when rulers did build monuments they normally cannibalized architecture from older structures. Already in the 1150s BCE, Ramses III’s government had apparently lost the ability to enforce law and order. Royal workers were constantly striking because there was no money to pay them.
Other contemporary states were just as shaky. In 1046 BCE, for instance, when a group called the Zhou overthrew the Shang who ruled China’s Yellow River Valley, they realized that they lacked the capacity to garrison and govern the conquered territories and did not even try. Instead, the Duke of Zhou encouraged members of his family to found new cities in the former Shang lands. Each new lord would be his own master, enriching himself as he saw fit. This saved the Duke from having to pay them to govern for him; all he asked was that when he went to war, the ‘Many Lords’ would join him, bringing contingents from their own cities. The Duke would then share the plunder with his chiefs.
Everyone in the upper reaches of society won. This low-end state did not bring in much revenue for Zhou rulers, but it did not cost much either, because the Duke and his successors paid no wages and kept part of the plunder for themselves. So long as the receipts were bigger than the expenditures, Zhou rulers stayed solvent. They could not afford to do much beyond building palaces, sacrificing to their ancestors, throwing enormous parties (which lowered the costs of ensuring elite compliance by persuading the Many Lords that the Zhou dynasty had a mandate from heaven and was therefore the sole human source of authority), and waging war, but they did not need to do much more than this.
It is less clear whether people in the lower reaches of society also won. The state’s weakness meant that peasants paid the government little or no tax, but rather than leaving the poor better off, this might just have meant that peasants had more property for the Many Lords to extract as rent. It is hard to know which outcome predominated, since few ordinary villages and towns have been excavated. On the one hand, later literary traditions remembered the first century of Zhou rule as a golden age of fairness and justice, but on the other, the gigantic bronze vessels and entire chariot teams found in elite tombs suggest spiralling aristocratic competition and perhaps also oppression of the peasantry, at least until about 850 BCE, when a degree of restraint set in.
This low-end model was reinvented multiple times [Assyria, Israel, …]
… [It] probably makes sense to think of both northern China and Egypt as clusters of separate city-states rather than rickety but unified Agrarias. In the early first millennium BCE, similar small units (typically with populations under ten thousand, organized around a fortified town) dominated the Levant from the Philistines in the south to the Neo-Hittites in the north. As population grew in the eighth century BCE, Greeks and Italians adopted and adapted similar forms of organization, and throughout the first millennium BCE, city-states flourished in the oases of Central Asia. Their commercial elites often enjoyed more freedom and power than those in Agrarias, their hierarchies were often less rigid, and some enjoyed astonishing cultural creativity.
Over the long run, groups of city-states tended to coalesce into larger Agrarias, either because one city-state conquered its peers or because all were conquered from outside; but on the other hand, when an Agraria broke apart (as happened in Egypt and China) it might decompose into dozens of city-states. This cycling back and forth was an important dynamic in the first millennium BCE, but, as we shall see, the long-term trend was very much towards large states absorbing small ones. The Indian epic the Mahabharata called this ‘the law of the fishes’: in times of drought, the big fish swallow the little ones.
The world in 175 CE
Much had changed by 175 CE, our period’s midpoint. Most obviously, the world’s population had roughly doubled (from 120 million to 250 million people) while the numbers living in states had leaped tenfold (from under 20 million to 200 million).
Foraging had continued to contract as farmers colonized more of the world’s arable land. By the second century CE, the farms and ranches of what archaeologists call the Chifumbaze Complex were firmly established in southern Africa, the best land in Melanesia and Micronesia had been dug up for sweet potatoes, and farmers of the Hopewell Culture were expanding along the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys in North America.
Herders on the Eurasian steppes saw astonishing institutional growth in the first millennium BCE. When the Greek historian Herodotus described the Scythian horse nomads in the fifth century BCE, they lived under kings who sometimes forged large federations to plunder agrarian societies. In 209 BCE, however, a chief named Maodun created such a huge alliance among the Xiongnu in what is now Mongolia that it seems reasonable to call it a nomadic state, or even an empire.
The growth of pastoral social and political organizations on the steppes went hand in hand with that of agrarian empires in the lucky latitudes, with men like Maodun building their followings by extorting wealth from settled societies using it to buy tribal chiefs’ loyalty. The contrast between tombs 1 and 2 at Arzhan in southern Siberia—the richest steppe burials of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE—and tomb 2 at Pazyryk—the richest of the third century BCE—is instructive: while the former featured huge tumuli and piles of gold ornaments and sacrificed horses, the latter was also heaped with Persian, Indian, and Chinese treasures.
Agrarian states were hard-pressed to hold off these highly mobile nomads, who had the advantage of surprise on the offence and the option of fleeing into the steppes in defence. Agrarian kings who were willing to spend enough on logistics could sometimes kill so many nomads that the survivors were afraid to raid for generations, as Darius I of Persia did against the ‘Pointy-Hatted Scythians’ in 519 BCE, and Wudi of Han China did against the Xiongnu after 134 BCE. More often, though, farming societies were reduced to bribing nomads not to raid (even though nomads regularly took bribes then raided anyway). When there were no rich empires to rob or extort, nomads sometimes even took control of parts of the lucky latitudes and looted them more thoroughly.
Nevertheless, in two main ways, agrarian states grew even more than those on the steppes: geographically, as Agraria spread into regions where it had previously not been known, and organizationally, as low-end states turned into high-end ones and deepened their capacity to intervene in their subjects’ lives.
There were two main mechanisms of growth, which we might call primary and secondary state formation. Primary state formation meant the creation of governments without borrowing ideas and methods from pre-existing states, while secondary state formation involved groups responding to neighbouring states by adopting and adapting their forms of government. In practice, of course, the two mechanisms can be difficult to separate. In the Mediterranean, for instance, a wave of state formation rolled from east to west between 800 and 100 BCE, but scholars rarely agree on the relative importance of indigenous developments, the influence of Phoenician and Greek colonists, or the impact of Roman conquerors.
In the Americas, by contrast, we can be certain we are often dealing with primary state formation. The lavish tombs at Sipán and the enormous Pyramid of the Sun surely mean that by 175 CE, the Moche people in the Andes had found their own route to Agraria. In contemporary Mesoamerica, Maya city-states were taking shape at Tikal and elsewhere, while Teotihuacan, with its spectacular monuments and population of 150,000, was clearly the capital of a state.
Because the New and Old Worlds had so little contact, they offer a ‘natural experiment,’ allowing us to test the notion of Homo superans by comparing two independent cases. In some ways, the New and Old Worlds followed rather similar paths. In both, organizational capacity deepened as population grew, following more or less the same timetables. In Mexico and the Andes, just as in the Middle East, India, and China, roughly six thousand years passed between the beginnings of cultivation of plants and animals and the rise of the first states. We might also note that the rulers of the earliest states all relied heavily on religion to legitimate their power and regularly advertised their godlike qualities with pyramidal monuments.
However, there are also striking differences. In the Old World, state formation, metallurgy, and writing usually came together as a package, but in the New World, only the Maya made much use of writing and although the elite had copper and gold ornaments, people were still living largely in the Stone Age when Columbus arrived. Explaining these similarities and differences should be a high priority for historians.
Having begun down the path of agriculture and organizational growth roughly two millennia earlier than New World societies, by 175 CE the Old World boasted vastly bigger and stronger states. Well before 175, in fact, the biggest Old World states had reached a threshold beyond which low-end institutions simply did not work very well. Low-end institutions were fine for states with populations of just a few millions, but not for societies of tens of millions, and across the first millennium BCE the biggest Old World states either reinvented themselves or fell apart under the stresses of clinging to outdated ways of operating.
The Middle East had had the world’s biggest sociopolitical organizations ever since the end of the Ice Age, and not surprisingly it was the first place to reach this threshold. In the 780s BCE, the Assyrian Empire had lurched into crisis as its kings lost control of the aristocracy, and a bloody coup launched in 744 BCE by a general named Pulu initially seemed to be one more step in the downward spiral. However, by the time Pulu (better known by his throne name, Tiglath-Pileser III) died in 727 BCE, he had transformed Assyrian state power. …
… Assyria’s passage from the low to the high end in the 730s BCE must have been painful, but the consequences were dramatic. Within fifty years it had become the biggest and richest empire yet seen. Its growth forced its neighbours to choose between being absorbed into it or emulating its methods and fighting back. Enough chose the latter that in 612 BCE a grand coalition (including, as mentioned earlier, Scythians from the steppes) destroyed Nineveh, but the cycle of growth could not be broken. The high-end genie was out of the bottle.
By 490 BCE Persia had conquered an even bigger empire, stretching from the Balkans to India and ruling some 35 million people, and in the 510s BCE, King Darius I had given it modern, high-end institutions able to mobilize enormous revenues and armies. In the 330s BCE, Alexander of Macedon overthrew its rulers, however, and after 301 BCE, his successors broke the empire into smaller units and set to fighting one another. Starting around 245 BCE, Parthian nomads infiltrated into Iran from the steppes and by 135 BCE they had reunited it and Mesopotamia under their own rule.
By then, giant new empires had also emerged further east. Persia and MaCEdon, both of which conquered the Indus Valley, must have influenced developments in India, but consolidation also began independently at the east end of the Ganges Valley. Progressively larger kingdoms formed around the city-state of Magadha in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and around 321 BCE Chandragupta created the much larger Mauryan Empire. Historians dispute how high-end this was, although the Arthashastra, a handbook on governing written by Chandragupta’s chief advisor Kautilya, certainly makes it sound very strong. In the 260s BCE, King Asoka claimed to have so much authority that he could renounce violence altogether. …
… China went through its own process of consolidation and growth. War whittled the 148 city-states documented around 700 BCE down to just 14 Agrarias by 450 BCE, and a single empire in 221 BCE. After an abrupt breakdown and civil war from 209 to 206 BCE, the Han dynasty created a flexible and stable system, although a second round of civil war in the 20s CE led them to cede much power back to the landed aristocracy. By 175 CE, the dynasty was struggling to contain elite feuding, internal revolts, and pressure on the frontiers.
The grandest empire of all was at the western end of Eurasia, which had had the biggest social and political organizations since the end of the Ice Age. Here, the city-state of Rome violently united the entire Mediterranean basin in the last three centuries BCE, swallowing up the Greek city-states along the way. These had been the most successful city-state system on record, with hundreds of statelets scattered from Spain to Crimea. These poleis supported a population of six million, enjoyed remarkable economic growth, and created an extraordinarily seductive culture, but could not compete with Roman military power. Rome even pushed its boundaries beyond the lucky latitudes, seizing northwest and parts of Central Europe.
By the first century BCE, Rome’s republican, city-state institutions had proved inadequate to the task of running the world’s greatest empire, and they disintegrated in terrible civil wars. When peace was restored after 31 BCE, Octavian—the last warlord standing—renamed himself Augustus, decreed that he was really no different from anyone else (just a lot richer), proclaimed that the Republic had been restored, and quietly began a half millennium of autocracy at Rome.
To different degrees, all these Eurasian empires moved toward a high-end model, distinguished by strong central institutions that effectively sidelined aristocrats and established direct links between the government and the peasants. The further a state moved in this direction (Rome and China went furthest, the Parthians and Kushans least far), the more it began dissolving the line separating its elites from the mass of peasants, reaching across it to grant farmers legal ownership of their land (rather than holding it as tenants of great lords), in return for which farmers paid taxes to the kings and accepted conscription into their armies. Rich, educated men still served as administrators and generals, and the richest were much richer in 175 CE than in 1000 BCE, but aristocrats’ power now typically depended on the king’s favour, rather than the reverse. In a high-end state, tax took precedence over rent; the minute the formula was reversed, as happened in China in the first century CE, the state started sliding back toward the low end.
Ultimately, kings needed tax revenues to create mass, iron-armed armies, usually dominated by infantry, with which they could deter or fight rival kings while also intimidating their own noblemen and peasants. Taxes, the army, and professionalized elites turned together in a tight circle, and once someone like Tiglath-Pileser dragged one state towards the high end, the only way its neighbours could survive was by following it.
High-end states remade organizations of every kind. Big empires required big cities, where services of every kind were concentrated. There were probably 100,000 people at Nineveh by 700 BCE and a million at Rome in 100 CE. To fill so many empty stomachs, the Roman Empire turned the whole Mediterranean into a marketing system to funnel food into the always-hungry capital. Agricultural output had to rise (as early as the fourth century BCE, Greeks were manuring and multicropping their fields, and population reached densities that would not be matched again until 1900 CE). Roads, ships, and harbours had to be improved so people could move the food around. New media of exchange were needed, and so coinage was independently invented in the East Mediterranean and China. Greeks and Romans invented increasingly complex instruments of credit and banking. More people had to be able to read and write, so education expanded. In the Mediterranean simple alphabets replaced tricky syllabaries, although even in Athens and Rome probably no more than one man in ten (and far fewer women) ever learned them. Abundant cheap tools and weapons were required, so iron replaced bronze. Necessity drove innovation and growth.
Last, but by no means least, rulers had to reinvent themselves. One of the low-end king’s chief tools for getting people to do what he said had been to claim that he was the only point of contact between this world and the divine sphere, meaning that anyone arguing with him was going against the will of the gods. In the first millennium BCE, however, one king after another found that his high-end state worked better if he recast himself as something more like a CEO, working with a bureaucracy rather than interpreting the will of the gods on behalf of mere mortals. Of course, plenty of people after 1000 BCE kept on seeing kings as gods, just as plenty before 1000 BCE had known that their rulers were all too human (even in Egypt, where pharaohs were technically gods incarnate, scribes happily described them as being too hung over to speak and getting excited watching teams of naked oarswomen rowing on the Nile). But by 175 CE, rulers almost everywhere were making fewer claims to godlike status than in earlier centuries.
The world in 1350 CE
[MGH: content of final section (omitted here) summarised by this map]
The Source:
Ian Morris, ‘Growth: Social and Political Organizations, 1000 BCE–1350 CE’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the World, edited by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Oxford University Press 2019
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.